QUESTION: "What do you tell the American people about what's going on? Should they be scared?"
https://soundcloud.com/john-catsimatidi ... ci-1-26-20I don't think so. The American people should not be frightened by this; it's a very, very low risk to the United States. But it's something that we as public health officials need to take very seriously.
***
It isn't something that the American public needs to worry about or be frightened about because we have ways of preparing, of screening people coming in, and we have way of responding like we did with this one case in Seattle, Washington, who had traveled to China and brought back the infection.
***
It does not seem to be as efficient in the persistent, sustained transmission from human to human. Without a doubt, it can travel from one human to another, but it doesn't seem yet to be doing that as efficiently - certainly not like influenza which spreads very efficiently in a sustained way. This does not do so, which means that just like SARS, we have the possibility, with good public health measures, of hopefully getting control of this.
Listening to that interview, on the whole, my takeaways as to what the prevailing wisdom was at the time among health officials in the United States was as follows:
-The virus can be contained and won't be a major threat to the US.
-It is less contagious than the seasonal flu
-Public health officials need to take it seriously, but we're generally prepared right now to contain it.
Looks to me like Dr. Fauci was outright wrong on 2 critical points. Kinda hard to say Trump should have done a lot more at this time, like enact social distancing guidelines, when his top health adviser was probably telling him (unless he lied and downplayed it on that interview but said something very different behind closed doors) this isn't a big deal - that it is a "low, low risk" to the United States as it isn't very contagious.
